Dans cet article sont examinés les différents sens du mot «probable» tel qu'il apparaît dans certains commentaires desTopiques d'Aristote, notamment ceux d'Alexandre d'Aphrodise, d'Averroès et surtout celui d'Agostino Nifo, ainsi que dans des traités qui s'en inspirent, notamment leDe dialogo de Carlo Sigonio et leDe inventione dialectica de Rudolph Agricola. On retrouve dans ces écrits les trois sens principaux de ce mot depuis Aristote et Cicéron: celui d'opinion communément admise, celui d'opinion qui correspond à «ce qui se passe la plupart (...) du temps» et celui d'opinion apte à produire la persuasion. À partir de cette polysémie du mot «probable», l'article met en évidence les différentes fonctions attribuées aux opinions probables dans ces divers écrits, plus particulièrement au XVIe siècle. L'association du mot «probable» avec la notion de vérité contingente conduit à mettre en valeur le lien entre hypothèse probable et conjecture. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, I propose to analyze controversies using a “dialectical” model, in the sense described in Aristotle'sTopics. This approach presupposes that we temporarily disregard, for the sake of clarity, the concreteness of real life controversies in order to focus on their argumentative structure. From this point of view, the main advantage of controversies is that they allow the interlocutorsto testeach other's claims and therefore to arrive at relatively corroborated conclusions. This testing function in (...) a dialectical context is implemented through theassentto commonly accepted premises, and thenecessitywhich characterizes each step of the reasoning.Secondly, I shall apply this dialectical framework to the study of the controversy concerning the motion of the Earth, or rather a small episode of it. I shall examine an exchange of letters, written in 1616 and in 1624 respectively, between Galileo Galilei and Francesco Ingoli, one of his Aristotelian opponents. I shall then compare this exchange with the first day of Galileo'sDialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, a fictional debate, where Galileo discusses some of the same arguments. While the first exemplifies what I call “negative” testing, and yields a refutation of the opponent's theses, the second exemplifies “positive” testing and yields a dialectical demonstration of the motion of the Earth. (shrink)

Cases—be they real or fictional—are commonplace both in the medical ethics literature and in the public media. Cases take on a variety of forms: from streamlined to book length narratives. They also serve a variety of different purposes, from illustration, to decision making, and from debunking to heuristics. Drawing on the rhetorical analysis of « exemplum », I shall describe what cases are, and what their role is in the practice of clinical ethics. I identify two basic ways in which (...) cases can be brought to bear on ethical thinking and practice: a « tamed » and a « wild » way, and show how « wild cases » can serve a useful heuristic function despite their appeal to emotions and their unusual and striking character. In conclusion, I will argue that cases, both in their wild and their tamed form, are not only useful pedagogical tools, but can serve as a legitimate empirical basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

introduction Dialectic and the notion of tradition The past does not pull back but presses forward. (Hannah Arendt 1977: 10) Through the confrontation over ...

This paper is about the use of analogical reasoning, models and metaphors in Galileo's discovery of the mountains of the moon, which he describes in the Starry Messenger, a short but groundbreaking treatise published in 1610. On the basis of the observations of the Moon he has made with the newly invented telescope, Galileo shows that the Moon has mountains and that therefore it shares the same solid, opaque and rugged nature of the Earth. I will first reconstruct Galileo's reasoning, (...) and illustrate the counterintuitive and quasi-circular way in which discovery depends on analogy: in order for analogical reasoning to succeed in bridging ontological gaps and thus serve as a discovery tool, a certain similarity between what are considered as radically different domains has to be presupposed. More particularly, in order for analogical reasoning to lead to genuine discoveries, salient features have to be selected in the source domain that will be mapped onto the target domain. There is disagreement as to how this mapping is successfully carried out: the syntactical, pragmatic and ontological-categorical approaches, all illuminate some features of this selection in the mapping process. On the basis of an analysis of Galileo's discovery, I will argue that we need a different "bootstrapping" approach which involves the construction of an imaginary temporary model encompassing both the source and the target domains, and which is occasionally strengthened by metaphors which serve as incomplete transitional models. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Most medical learned societies have endorsed both "equivalence" between all forms of withholding or withdrawing treatment and the "discontinuity" between euthanasia and practices to withhold or withdraw treatment. While the latter are morally acceptable insofar as they consist in letting the patient die, the former constitutes an illegitimate act of actively interfering with a patient's life. The moral distinction between killing and letting die has been hotly debated both conceptually and empirically, most notably by experimental philosophers, with inconclusive results. This (...) article employs a "revisionary" intuititionist perspective to discuss the results of a clinical ethics study about intensivists' perceptions of withhold or withdraw decisions. The results show that practitioners' moral experience is at odds with both the discontinuity and equivalence theses. This outcome allows us to revisit certain concepts, such as intention and causal relationship, that are prominent in the conceptual debate. Intensivists also regard end-of-life decisions as being on a scale from least to most active, and whether they regard active forms of end-of-life decisions as ethically acceptable depends on the overarching professional values they endorse: the patient's best chances of survival, or the patient's quality of life. (shrink)

Advance directives have been hailed for two decades as the best way to safeguard patients’ autonomy when they are totally or partially incompetent. In many national contexts they are written into law and they are mostly associated with end-of-life decisions. Although advocates and critics of ADs exchange relevant empirical and theoretical arguments, the debate is inconclusive. We argue that this is so for good reasons: the ADs’ project is fraught with tensions, and this is the reason why they are both (...) important and deeply problematic. We outline six such tensions, and conclude with some positive suggestions about how to better promote patients’ autonomy in end-of-life decision. We argue that ADs should continue to be an option but they cannot be the panacea that they are expected to be. (shrink)

Bioethics laws in France have just undergone a revision process. The bioethics debate is often cast in terms of ethical principles and norms resisting emerging social and technological practices. This leads to the expression of confrontational attitudes based on widely differing interpretations of the same principles and values, and ultimately results in a deadlock. In this paper I would like to argue that focusing on values, as opposed to norms and principles, provides an interesting perspective on the evolution of norms. (...) As Joseph Raz has convincingly argued, “life-building” values and practices are closely intertwined. Precisely because values have a more indeterminate meaning than norms, they can be cited as reasons for action by concerned stakeholders, and thus can help us understand how controversial practices, e.g. surrogate motherhood, can be justified. Finally, norms evolve when the interpretations of the relevant values shift and cause a change in the presumptions implicit in the norms. Thus, norms are not a prerequisite of the ethical solution of practical dilemmas, but rather the outcome of the decision-making process itself. Struggling to reach the right decision in controversial clinical ethics situations indirectly causes social and moral values to change and principles to be understood differently. (shrink)

Cases—be they real or fictional—are commonplace both in the medical ethics literature and in the public media. Cases take on a variety of forms: from streamlined to book length narratives. They also serve a variety of different purposes, from illustration, to decision making, and from debunking to heuristics. Drawing on the rhetorical analysis of « exemplum », I shall describe what cases are, and what their role is in the practice of clinical ethics. I identify two basic ways in which (...) cases can be brought to bear on ethical thinking and practice: a « tamed » and a « wild » way, and show how « wild cases » can serve a useful heuristic function despite their appeal to emotions and their unusual and striking character. In conclusion, I will argue that cases, both in their wild and their tamed form, are not only useful pedagogical tools, but can serve as a legitimate empirical basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

An elderly patient in his early eighties is hospitalized in a long-term facility, with advanced Alzheimer disease. He is otherwise relatively strong and free from other life-threatening conditions, except for the fact that he has difficulties swallowing. After several episodes of acute aspiration pneumonia doctors prescribe “strict fast”: only hydration through an IV catheter should be administered during the night, in order to relieve the feeling of hunger, provide comfort, and stave off death. The patient is surrounded by a warm (...) and extremely close-knit Mediterranean family. His wife and six adult children take turns feeding him properly mixed food twice a day and prefer to take the risk of causing another... (shrink)

The French bioethics laws of 1994 contain the principles of the anonymity and non commodification of all donations of body parts and products including gametes in medically assisted reproduction. The two revisions of the law, in 2004 and 2011 have upheld the rule. In view of the latest revision process, the French government organized a large public consultation in 2009. Within the event a “consensus conference” was held in Rennes about different aspects of assisted reproduction. In what follows we shall (...) first describe the anonymity clause for gamete donations in the French law and the debates surrounding it. We shall then analyse the procedure used for the 2009 public consultation and the related consensus conference, as well as its upshot concerning the anonymity doctrine. In this respect we shall compare the citizens’ own recommendations on the gamete anonymity issue and its translation in the consultation’s final report drafted by a philosopher mandated by the organizing committee. Whereas the final report cited some fundamental ethical arguments as reason for upholding the provisions of the law—most notably the refusal of the ‘all biological’ approach to reproductive issues—citizens were more careful and tentative in their position although they also concluded that for pragmatic reasons the anonymity rule should continue to hold. We shall argue that the conservative upshot of the public consultation is due to some main underlying presuppositions concerning the citizens’ role and expertise as well as to the specific design of the consensus conference. Our conclusion will be that public consultations and consensus conferences can only serve as an empirical support for devising suitable bioethics norms by using second-order normative assumptions. (shrink)

A commentary on “The Ethics of Anonymous Gamete Donation: Is There a Right to Know One's Genetic Origins?” by Inmaculada de Melo‐Martín, in the March‐April 2014 issue.

In 2009, an influential and remarkable report to the French highest health authorities written by Claire Compagnon, a patients' advocate, and Véronique Ghadi, a legal scholar, has brought to public attention a phenomenon that had gone unnoticed in medical ethics: the report's authors called it "ordinary abuse".1 They argue that the term describes a widespread and invisible form of mistreatment in the hospital setting, which they distinguish from abuse proper, a phenomenon, they argue, which is far less common and controversial. (...) "Ordinary abuse," they write, occurs for example when patients have to accept "interminable and inexplicable... (shrink)

While in Europe the debate over clinical ethics consultants’ expertise and professionalization is ongoing, in France it remains rather marginal. In this article, we illustrate how the “commitment model” adopted by the Clinical Ethics Center of the Greater Paris University Hospitals situates itself in such a debate. We first present the commitment model by drawing upon an emblematic case of consultation, and then describe, in turn, its understandings of democratic expertise and of the professionalization of clinical ethics consultation. Accordingly, the (...) commitment model advocates against individual consultants’ certification, but it does not rule out the need for training nor a certain form of professionalization of clinical ethics consultation services. (shrink)

Several approaches to clinical ethics consultation (CEC) exist in medical practice and are widely discussed in the clinical ethics literature; different models of CECs are classified according to their methods, goals, and consultant’s attitude. Although the “facilitation” model has been endorsed by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and is described in an influential manual, alternative approaches, such as advocacy, moral expertise, mediation, and engagement are practiced and defended in the clinical ethics field. Our Clinical Ethics Center in (...) Paris was founded in 2002 in the wake of the Patients’ Rights Act, and to date it is the largest center that provides consultation services in France. In this article we shall describe and defend our own approach to clinical ethics consultation, which we call the “Commitment Model,” in comparison with other existing models. Indeed commitment implies, among other meanings, continuity through time, a series of coherent actions, and the realization of important social goals. By drawing on a recent consultation case, we shall describe the main steps of our consultation procedure: interviews with major stakeholders, including patients and proxies; case conferences; and follow up. We shall show why we have chosen the term “commitment” to represent our approach at three different but interrelated levels: commitment towards patients, within the case conference group, and towards society as a whole. (shrink)

Daryl Pullman’s (2023) article purports to show that the increase and relatively high number of assisted deaths in Canada argues against the Canadian approach to medical aid in dying (MAiD)—similar...

After the ‘empirical turn’ in bioethics, few specific approaches have been developed for doing clinical ethics research in close connection with clinical decision-making on a daily basis. In this paper we describe the ‘committed researcher’ approach to research in clinical ethics that we have developed over the years. After comparing it to two similar research methodological approaches, the ‘embedded researcher’ and ‘deliberative engagement’, we highlight its main features: it is patient-oriented, it is implemented by collegial and multidisciplinary teams, it uses (...) an ethical grid to build the interview guide, and it is geared towards bringing the results to bear on the public debate surrounding the issue at stake. Finally, we position our methodological approach with respect to the ‘is vs. ought’ distinction. We argue that our ‘commitment researcher’ approach to clinical ethics research takes concerned people’s life-building values as the main data, and compares them to the larger normative framework underlying the medical practice at stake. (shrink)

In 1994, France passed bioethics laws regulating assisted reproductive technologies, organ donations and prenatal diagnosis. These laws were based upon a few principles considered as fundamental: the anonymity and gratuity of all donations concerning the elements of the human body, free and informed consent, and the interdiction of all commercial transactions on the human body. These laws have been the object of heated debates which continue to this day. On the basis on a few clinical ethics studies conducted by the (...) Center for clinical ethics at the Cochin Hospital in Paris, the articles presented in this special issues explore several aspects of the bioethics debate, and relate it to the more general question of the complex relationship between norms, practices and values. (shrink)

Withdrawing Artificial Nutrition and Hydration in the neonatal intensive care units has long been controversial. In France, the practice has become a legal option since 2005. But even though, the question remains as to what the stakeholders’ experience is, and whether they consider it ethically appropriate. In order to contribute to the debate, we initiated a study in 2009 to evaluate parental and health care professionals perspectives, after they experienced WAHN for a newborn. The study included 25 cases from 5 (...) different clinical neonatology departments. We interviewed both the parents and some of the HCP who cared for the baby, at least 6 months after this latter deceased. We proceeded through in-depth individual qualitative interviews. Content was analyzed for themes and patterns that emerged from the data. Some parents expressed that WANH offered an opportunity to the family to spend a few demedicalized days with the baby before she dies, without any tubes and machines, and to be well supported by the HCP during this palliative stage. But others evaluated the practice in retrospect as a terrible ordeal. All said that, at least, the time of waiting for death to ensue should not last too long. After a few days, it becomes unbearable because of the transformation of the baby’s appearance and because they, as parents, began to wonder if she was not dying from starvation rather than from her initial disease. An important proportion of HCP also expressed some kind of ethical unease. This was due to the psychological violence involved in the decision for a human being to stop feeding a little one, and also to the difficulty to deal with the fundamental intention behind the decision of WANH: indeed, could it be claim that it does not presuppose the intention of provoking the infant’s death? The discussion focuses on the point to know if WANH can be considered as a source of progress from an ethical point of view, particularly in comparison with earlier practices—that in France could involve active euthanasia by lethal injection. We argue that when HCP are merely focused on avoiding that WAHN could be construed as a way of intending to hasten the baby’s death, the practice is at risk to be implemented in a way that becomes ethically counterproductive. Focusing on this intention easily distract the clinical teams from what should be their ultimate concern, namely the baby’s comfort during the dying process, as well as the support owned to her parents. To conclude, we suggest that the ethical priorities, when WANH is decided, should be the support due to the patient and her family on the one hand, and, on the other hand to implement it in such a way that at least the baby seems to have died of her initial disease and never of starvation. This means that HCP have a duty to control the timing of death, even though this might be incompatible with the worry to avoid the intention of hastening the baby’s death. (shrink)

The big Leibnizian news from Israel is that from October 1st up to September 30 we are running here, at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a research project centered on our beloved hero. The project, involves scholars as well as graduate students from many countries. Some will be fellows of the Institute for practically the whole year [Marcelo Dascal, Gideon Freudenthal, Massimo Mugnai, Carl Posy, Quintin Racionero, Elhanan Yakira ]. Other colleagues will be here for shorter periods [, Ezequiel de (...) Olaso, Kuno Lorenz, Alan Gross, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Olga Pombo, Marta Spranzi-Zuber, Mirella Saim, etc.]. Several other scholars have been also participating regularly in our seminars and working sessions, which have been so far very lively. We are working in parallel paths: A. trying to learn about other approaches to controversies and to develop our own approach; B. studying Leibniz’s own theory or theories of controversies; C. studying Leibniz’s practice of controversy, in several particular cases. (shrink)

The big Leibnizian news from Israel is that from October 1st up to September 30 we are running here, at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a research project centered on our beloved hero. The project, involves scholars as well as graduate students from many countries. Some will be fellows of the Institute for practically the whole year [Marcelo Dascal, Gideon Freudenthal, Massimo Mugnai, Carl Posy, Quintin Racionero, Elhanan Yakira ]. Other colleagues will be here for shorter periods [, Ezequiel de (...) Olaso, Kuno Lorenz, Alan Gross, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Olga Pombo, Marta Spranzi-Zuber, Mirella Saim, etc.]. Several other scholars have been also participating regularly in our seminars and working sessions, which have been so far very lively. We are working in parallel paths: A. trying to learn about other approaches to controversies and to develop our own approach; B. studying Leibniz’s own theory or theories of controversies; C. studying Leibniz’s practice of controversy, in several particular cases. (shrink)

If non-human animals experience wellbeing and suffering, such welfare consequences arguably should be included in a social welfare evaluation. Yet economic evaluations almost universally ignore non-human animals, in part because axiomatic social choice theory has failed to propose and characterize multi-species social welfare functions. Here we propose axioms and functional forms to fill this gap. We provide a range of alternative representations, characterizing a broad range of possibilities for multi-species social welfare. Among these, we identify a new characterization of additively-separable (...) generalized (multi-species) total utilitarianism. The multispecies setting permits a novel, weak species-level separability axiom with important consequences. We provide examples to illustrate that non-separability across species is implausible in a multi-species setting, in part because good lives for different species are at very different welfare levels. Finally, we explore the consequences for evaluating climate policy and understanding speciesism and non-climate environmental goals, such as biodiversity. (shrink)

I was first taken to Mr Gurdjieff's flat at a time very different from the present. Paris during the war, under German occupation, was in the grip of the ...

Plato's Republic VII suggests that if we ask someone to philosophize when they are too young, they can become corrupted (537e–539d). Republic VII also suggests that to avoid this corruption, we must not expose youth to argument (539a–b). This is not a reasonable option outside of Kallipolis, so a question arises: does Plato describe how to correct corruption if we do not manage to prevent it? This paper shows that a parallel between this passage from Republic VII and a passage (...) from Laws X suggests that he does. Laws X describes an impious man who is corrupted in the same way as the youth exposed to philosophy prematurely in Republic VII. While we leave the youth to his corruption in Republic, the impious man is helped to overcome his corruption in Laws with a refutation followed by a myth (also called a charm). This paper analyses these steps in terms of Plato's psychology, showing that both corruption and correction require a destabilization of the soul, which in these passages is brought about through refutation. This destabilization allows for a reconfiguration, which, with something that can restabilize the soul (for example with myth), can be a reconfiguration for the better. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure relational essences do not yield genuine de re (...) constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

Software systems play an ever more important role in our lives and software engineers and their companies find themselves in a position where they are held responsible for ethical issues that may arise. In this paper, we try to disentangle ethical considerations that can be performed at the level of the software engineer from those that belong in the wider domain of business ethics. The handling of ethical problems that fall into the responsibility of the engineer has traditionally been addressed (...) by the publication of Codes of Ethics and Conduct. We argue that these Codes are barely able to provide normative orientation in software development. The main contribution of this paper is, thus, to analyze the normative features of Codes of Ethics in software engineering and to explicate how their value-based approach might prevent their usefulness from a normative perspective. Codes of Conduct cannot replace ethical deliberation because they do not and cannot offer guidance because of their underdetermined nature. This lack of orientation, we argue, triggers reactive behavior such as “cherry-picking,” “risk of indifference,” “ex-post orientation,” and the “desire to rely on gut feeling.” In the light of this, we propose to implement ethical deliberation within software development teams as a way out. (shrink)

A complete, illustrated survey of Etienne-Jules Marey's work that investigates the far reaching effects of her inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

In this paper I show that a novel ontic reading of explanation, intending to capture the de re essential features of individuals, can support the qualitative view of individual essences. It is argued further that the putative harmful consequences of the Leibniz Principle and its converse for the qualitative view can be avoided, provided that individual essences are not construed in the style of the naïve bundle theory with set-theoretical identity- conditions. Adopting either the more sophisticated two-tier BT or, alternatively, (...) the neo-Aristotelian position of taking essences as natures in the Aristotelian sense, can help to evade these main charges against the qualitative view. The functional parallels with the alternative haecceitistic view of individuation and individual essence will also be considered. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, we investigate the extension of Haidt’s :814–834, 2001, The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, 2012) Moral foundations theory, operationalized as the MFQ30 questionnaire, from a sample of the general public across many countries to a sample of business students. MFT posits that people rely on five major concerns, or foundations, when making moral judgments. The five concerns are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, respect/authority, and purity/degradation. In addition, Haidt suggests that intuition, rather (...) than reasoning, leads to moral judgment. We replicate Haidt’s measurement model and find that the measurement model based on our sample is consistent. This indicates support for MFT. Further, we find structural differences in the measurement model between the genders and between areas of study. Our findings suggest that all students in the sample focus substantially on the fairness foundation. Ethics education and research may seek to expand the number of moral foundations individuals consider when discerning whether something is right or wrong. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.